# Do guide dogs know their owners are blind?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [March 28, 2020, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501 "2020-03-28T09:14:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@jerez](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jerez)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/1 "2020-03-28T09:14:11Z")
I Googled “guide dogs know blind” to see if this had come up before on the SDMB. Didn’t find anything, although I noticed that someone asked in 2001 if blind people get visuals on acid. 🙂
Factual responses would be nice, although I’m guessing that’s not possible. So here I am asking for your humble opinion: Do guide dogs know their owners are blind?
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### Author:  [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 9:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/2 "2020-03-28T09:38:03Z")
I doubt that they grasp the concept.
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### Author:  [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 9:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/3 "2020-03-28T09:53:31Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#):
>
> I doubt that they grasp the concept.
I agree. I don’t think dogs reify things like people do.
Besides, for dogs, sight is not as important as smell-- watch a blind dog run around sometime, and it will surprise you-- and I mean a young dog born blind. Most blind dogs became blind in old age, and they are slow because they are old, but young blind dog bops around in an amazing way, with their dog-hearing, and dog-smell.
They don’t even get how sight is important to humans for getting around, or recognizing people. So even if they could grasp “this human does no see,” I don’t think they would know what that _means_, in human terms.
Incidentally, I even know one Deaf-blind dog whose ability to get around solely by smell amazes me. Maybe she uses echolocation a little or something-- I have no idea. But she runs around, and never bumps into things, recognizes when familiar people have com into the room and runs up to them like any dog, knows when her owner has come home, and greets her at the door. I asked if it was possible that she had some hearing, and was told that that it was possible, but the vet didn’t think so. If she did, it was in the 70dB range. That would means she could hear sirens, thunder, lawn mowers, but that would be about it. She was born Deaf-blind, and has always gotten around just fine.
She’s an albino Pit Bull, and she is probably blind because she is an albino-- she may see shadows, but she keeps her eyes closed most of the time. She may be Deaf from inbreeding.
She was scheduled to be put down, when her current owner discovered her. She was only a couple of weeks old, and her owner took her and bottle-fed her to save her from being put down (the litter was big, and the owners of the mother wanted to cull her from the litter to keep her taking resources from the “good” dogs they could sell). So she is very strongly bonded with her owner. She’s about 4 right now, and very healthy. She plays with my dog, who doesn’t seem to have a clue that she’s “different”-- which was actually my point in telling that story.
If dogs can’t seem to sense blindness in another dog, I doubt they can sense it in a human.
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### Author:  [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 10:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/4 "2020-03-28T10:18:52Z")
I think it could be answered. Place a trained guide dog in a room with mixed sighted and blind people – see if the dog reacts differently to individuals, depending on the dog’s perception of whether they can see or not.
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### Author:  [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 10:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/5 "2020-03-28T10:35:45Z")
People have about 6 million olafactory receptors in their noses. Dogs have 300 million. Dogs have been trained to find cadavers under water. Running water. Dogs track game by distinguishing the difference in odor decay between one footstep and the next. They can apparently smell when someone is about to have an epileptic seizure. Many other examples can be given.
What I’m trying to get at is that dogs live in a world in which sight is a minor sense the way smell is for us. So it is hard to ask that question even if dogs did abstract thought which they don’t. A dog easily perceives when someone needs guidance, and that’s all a service dog needs, really.
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### Author:  [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/6 "2020-03-28T11:30:41Z")
There is a thread with opinions from sight impaired folks here: [https://www.quora.com/Do-seeing-eye-dogs-realize-that-their-owners-are-blind](https://www.quora.com/Do-seeing-eye-dogs-realize-that-their-owners-are-blind)
Interesting.
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 12:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/7 "2020-03-28T12:01:30Z")
First ask “Do guide dogs \*know \*?”
How much cognition do dogs possess?
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### Author:  [@madsircool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madsircool)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/8 "2020-03-28T13:08:06Z")
> **[Is Your Dog Super Smart? No, LOL](https://www.livescience.com/63742-dogs-brain-not-smart.html)**
>
> The authors of a new paper suggested that scientists have overstated dog smarts. But a dog researcher tells Live Science we should study canines anyway.
> [@](#):
>
> “In my view, the existing literature does not necessarily imply that dogs are unusually intelligent per se. Rather, much of the recent research on canine cognition simply argues that dogs’ manner of thinking and reasoning about certain components of the world is distinct,” he said.
>
> In other words, dogs aren’t super-thinkers, but they are special thinkers.
>
> A lot of that canine specialness has to do with the history of dogs as a species, Silver said. They evolved alongside humans, and that experience likely shaped their ways of thinking about the world. By comparing dogs to humans and other species, he said, “we can better understand what makes us unique and what is shared across genetic or social lines.”
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/9 "2020-03-28T13:37:16Z")
Do dogs know that humans can’t smell as well as they can? Compared to a dog, we’re pretty “nose-blind”.
I’d wager that they at least know that they are more competent than us in some ways, even if they don’t know exactly what those ways are.
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### Author:  [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/10 "2020-03-28T14:01:36Z")
> [@jtur88](#):
>
> I think it could be answered. Place a trained guide dog in a room with mixed sighted and blind people – see if the dog reacts differently to individuals, depending on the dog’s perception of whether they can see or not.
Along a similar vein, don’t dogs usually give their owners visual clues? Don’t they try to use body language and facial expressions to communicate to their humans? I read something about the evolution of differently colored eyebrows and more complex muscles and nerves around the eyes in domesticated breeds that spoke to this.
Do guide dogs, and other dogs familiar with blind humans, skip doing this?
That might not be a good test, though. Judging from what I notice in my rear view mirror, hand gestures are common in humans speaking on cell phones.
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### Author:  [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/11 "2020-03-28T14:09:59Z")
> [@Ulfreida](#):
>
> Dogs have been trained to find cadavers under water.
To clarify, the cadavers are under water, not the dogs.
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### Author:  [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/12 "2020-03-28T20:25:18Z")
We’ve trained four guide dogs, the last of which became a breeder. I doubt the dogs know since all their initial training is with sighted people. They get assigned their partner when they are about a year and a half old, after going through training with their raiser and then with the professionals.
The dogs are trained with voice cues, not visual cues. About the first thing you teach is “do your business” to have them relieve. We went on an outing with the raisers club that included a ferry ride from Oakland to San Francisco - it was very impressive to see 12 dogs peeing all at once before we got on.
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### Author:  [@jerez](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jerez)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/13 "2020-03-28T20:31:16Z")
Interesting ideas upthread. Feel free to share any “my-dog-understands-me” stories, but it would be more interesting to talk about consensus among trainers or others who have experience with lots of dogs (like Voyager’s post, which I’ve just seen).
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> …I’d wager that they at least know that they are more competent than us in some ways, even if they don’t know exactly what those ways are.
When playing with dogs, does it seem that they “know” they’re faster than we are? I’ve never really had a dog or spent much time observing them.
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### Author:  [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/14 "2020-03-28T20:36:47Z")
> [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#):
>
> First ask “Do guide dogs \*know \*?”
>
> How much cognition do dogs possess?
I agree there’s probably not a lot of cognition going on.
I was amused to watch an Australian shepherd at an outdoor barbecue circling around a group of people, nudging and nipping their heels to “herd” them into a smaller group. There’s no thought other than “My hobby is keeping animals grouped together”.
I imagine guide dogs have the instinctual experience of “My hobby is to move humans along open, safe paths”. I know this instinct is supplemented with training to identify and alert on specific unsafe conditions (certain boundaries, moving objects, certain obstacles, elevation changes) and they also learn the paths that are routine for their person.
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### Author:  [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/15 "2020-03-28T21:02:40Z")
> [@Voyager](#):
>
> We’ve trained four guide dogs, the last of which became a breeder. I doubt the dogs know since all their initial training is with sighted people. They get assigned their partner when they are about a year and a half old, after going through training with their raiser and then with the professionals.
> The dogs are trained with voice cues, not visual cues. About the first thing you teach is “do your business” to have them relieve. We went on an outing with the raisers club that included a ferry ride from Oakland to San Francisco - it was very impressive to see 12 dogs peeing all at once before we got on.
Cool! Was that Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael? My friend got all three of her dogs from them.
I also had a friend who lived in San Rafael, and he said he often saw the trainers out with their “trainees.” And you could really tell which ones were the new dogs!
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### Author:  [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/16 "2020-03-28T21:05:23Z")
Don’t big mammalian carnivores learn the abilities and limits of other animals, if those other animals are to be prey? If they have that ability generally, they may well use it on us too.
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### Author:  [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/17 "2020-03-28T21:16:43Z")
> [@Napier](#):
>
> Don’t big mammalian carnivores learn the abilities and limits of other animals, if those other animals are to be prey? If they have that ability generally, they may well use it on us too.
They don’t really “know” these things. Size is important, which they get from sight or sound cues. Scent can indicate species. Gait also indicates species, as well as health. The combination of these cues determines how the animal responds.
So they don’t really know “bears have claws”, they know “climb a tree when you see a fast-moving, bear-smelling thing that has a low-pitched roar”. Size, speed, species.
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### Author:  [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2020, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/18 "2020-03-28T21:38:06Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#):
>
> So they don’t really know “bears have claws”, they know “climb a tree when you see a fast-moving, bear-smelling thing that has a low-pitched roar”. Size, speed, species.
I doubt 1 in a million dogs could climb a tree higher than a bear could reach
> [@RivkahChaya](#):
>
> Incidentally, I even know one Deaf-blind dog whose ability to get around solely by smell amazes me. Maybe she uses echolocation a little or something-- I have no idea.
I don’t think a deaf dog is using echolocation. YMMV
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### Author:  [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2020, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/19 "2020-03-29T01:17:03Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#):
>
> I agree there’s probably not a lot of cognition going on.
Dogs have the ability to learn language, at the level of a toddler. Your claim that there is not a lot of cognition going on strikes me as dismissive of plain observation.
Having said that, I doubt that dogs develop a broad concept of blindness, although they may very well learn to differentiate between how a blind companion behaves versus a sighted one and act accordingly.
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### Author:  [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2020, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-guide-dogs-know-their-owners-are-blind/850501/20 "2020-03-29T01:40:58Z")
> [@OldGuy](#):
>
> I don’t think a deaf dog is using echolocation. YMMV
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. We have speculated that she may feel vibration in her face. Sometimes she yaps when she is running around, and it’s a very specific kind of yap; it seems sort of rhythmic-- coming at regular intervals. We have wondered if she can feel it bounce back, particularly in her nose, which is a bit of an echo chamber.
She perks her ears up at sounds, too-- not the way other Pits do. She has learned to stand her ears almost all the way up, like a GSD. We know she can’t hear, so we wonder if she feels vibrations in them.
We are absolutely certain that she feels other dogs paw-falls when they run around. I’m sure scent plays a big roll in running with other dogs, but when she runs with other dogs at the park, I’m sure she is feeling them through the ground.
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